Monday, October 22, 2007

The Gift of Chocolate!

Who doesn't love chocolate? It's one of those gifts that you can rarely go wrong giving!

Recently, for some unknown reason, I had a spare canning jar sitting in my stamp room. I think it was from a project my son did with the children this summer at church camp (he was a counselor). Whatever had been inside was now gone, so I saw the jar as ripe for a makeover!

I had been itching to cover some Hershey's Nuggets with my own hand stamped labels, like the ones I have been seeing on all the blogs lately. Can I just tell you how simple these things are? All I did was take a full sheet of Avery mailing labels (size 8160 if you want to buy some for yourself) and randomly stamped a few of the snowflakes from the Verve Visual Winter Wonder set all over the labels (there are 30 labels per sheet). I stamped the snowflakes in both Old Olive and Cranberry Crisp ink. Then I stamped my sentiment, "Joy to the World", in the center of each label. I slightly distressed the labels by rubbing my Ranger Distress Ink in Tea Stain all over them, which took the bright white of the labels down a notch! Now, the next part of this process is slightly more difficult, so pay CLOSE attention....after you are done wrapping your label around the chocolate nugget, very carefully unwrap another nugget and pop it into your mouth! Continue this pattern until all the nuggets are wrapped! Wrap one, eat one. Wrap one, eat one. It's easy once you get the hang of it! Hee-hee! Once I had enough candies wrapped with my hand stamped label, I tossed them into my canning jar, which I had decorated with a little bit with ribbon and a little bit of Cosmo Cricket paper.

The accompanying gift card actually got it's start as part of a pre-packaged set of 3x3 gift cards from the $1 bin at Michael's! All I did was cover it with some fabulous Cosmo Cricket designer paper (Be Good) to start with. Then I glued a piece of gold metallic cardstock to the back of the inside front cover and then cut around it with my decorative scissors. The main image was really simple as well. I took a piece of Very Vanilla cardstock, stamped one of the snowflakes from Winter Wonder with Cranberry Crisp ink and then glued gold Martha Stewart glitter on the snowflake! Then I stamped the sentiment four times, once on each side of the snowflake just for something a little different! After I matted the main image with gold metallic cardstock, I adhered it to the front of the card with dimensional tape. This project was just so much fun that I decided to keep stamping! Can you see the envelope, laying right in front of the mini gift card? I decorated it too! Just a few more snowflakes, stamped in Old Olive and Cranberry Crisp ink, finish off the envelope perfectly and tie it into the rest of the gift!

This Verve Visual stamp set is going to be a favorite of mine this season, I can tell!

Stamps: Winter Wonder (Verve Visual)Paper: Be Good (Cosmo Cricket), Very Vanilla(Stampin' Up, gold metallic cardstock (unknown)Ink: Cranberry Crisp, Old Olive (Stampin! Up)Accessories: Olive Satin Ribbon (Basics),Cranberry Ribbon (Basics),glitter (Martha Stewart), Candy (Hersheys), Labels (Avery)